Tools of the Enemy

I’m a conservative guy, because God is conservative. It’s that simple. God is pro-Christianity. He is pro-Israel. He hates sexual sin. He is against turning the government into a new god. He is fanatically in favor of free will, which is something leftism erodes. He hates covetousness, which is the basis of leftism. He is also anti-democracy; he prefers to see people led by the Holy Spirit. Barring that, he prefers leadership through priests and prophets who hear from the Holy Spirit. Barring that, he prefers a Holy-Spirit-led king. Democracy is inherently degenerate, because it allows the least-godly people, who are ruled by demons, to choose our leaders. Democracy is a leftist idea, and God doesn’t like it.

Think about all the bad things that happened in the Bible when people voted. They voted against God while Moses led them in the desert. They voted for a king instead of priests and prophets, even after God told them he would curse them for it. They voted to murder Jesus. The voice of a crowd is the voice of the Beast.

I am conservative, but I am no longer stupid enough to think a conservative government will solve our problems. Relying primarily on any form of government is evil, and it leads to destruction. We are supposed to trust God, not a bunch of elected goofballs and weak intellects who only care about themselves.

I don’t give money to political campaigns. I do write about politics. Sometimes I do it out of weakness, but generally (I hope), I write about politics from a Christian perspective. For example, I like to show how our political mess reflects the fact that God isn’t blessing us the way he used to, and I like to wake people up and help them understand that leftism is Satanic.

I’m not the political creature I was a few years ago. I don’t even read newspapers now. I felt that God told me to quit looking at the news. I give in occasionally, but I continue to try to obey.

I do not believe in protesting or going to rallies. I’m all done with that. It’s carnal. God never called us to protest. He called us to pray and share our testimony. His tools are powerful. Protesting is weak and carnal. Voter registration drives are weak and carnal. Debate may be the weakest and most carnal tool of all; faith is supernatural, not mental. You can’t force someone to have faith by winning a ridiculous argument. My time on earth is limited, and I have already wasted way too much of it on weak tools that don’t work.

I am conservative, but I’m very disturbed by the new militance of some people on the right. The left is completely devoted to Satan, and there is no point in trying to fix it, but the right has a history of being considerably less corrupt. As time passes, the right’s attachment to God is getting weaker, and we are starting to look more and more like Antifa and BLM, two vile, Satanic movements.

Going out in the street in a hockey helmet and hitting de-breasted lesbians with a golf club is not going to fix America. If right-wing militants prevail over left-wing militants, we won’t get any closer to God, nor will we have increased peace and prosperity. We’ll just have a conservative nation which is just as godless as the leftist nation it supplanted.

God is conservative, but you can be conservative and against God.

I’m used to being able to point at the political right and say, “We’re not as bad as the left.” I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to say that. Godless conservatives are multiplying.

I like to watch videos about tools. One of my favorite video hosts is (was) a guy who calls himself ChuckE2009. He’s a young man from Ohio. He lives in Texas, and he posts videos about tools, tractors, and farming. I used to find him inspiring. He came from a broken home (according to Internet gossip). He went to welding school for three years. He got himself a farm. He saved and did without so he could get ahead. He created a popular Youtube channel, and sometimes he promoted his values, most of which I agreed with.

A while back, he posted a video in which he said older people who had given him advice when he was young were right. He was talking about life lessons. He criticized things like abortion and sexual deviancy. He criticized irresponsibility. I was impressed. I thought he was hearing from God.

His videos have changed. He talks about “getting woke,” which is horrible grammar. The other day he posted a video in which he used the term “precious European blood.” He complained about the changing racial composition of America, which is not, in and of itself, evil. He showed a photo of a bride and groom; the bride was white, and the groom was black.

Uh oh.

He also talks about fighting back. That’s not good. That’s militia-nut talk.

I thought he was a young Christian whose eyes were being opened, but I was wrong. He has been blinded, just like the Antifa kids who throw urine at cops. He may look and sound a lot like newly enlightened Christians, but it’s superficial. When he starts endorsing racism, it becomes obvious that spirits other than God are mentoring him.

There are only two races: the children of God and the children of Satan. They aren’t just races; they are families. Your earthly race means nothing at all. Turning against an earthly race is evil, and so is exalting an earthly race.

If Europeans have done well, it’s because they were the primary exponents of the gospel for hundreds of years. God taught them a lot, and he blessed them. He gave them other people’s lands, and he made them prevail. The success of white people and their lower crime rate do not indicate that whites are the master race. They indicate that God has lifted them up because many of them submitted to him.

Whites aren’t losing their dominance because other races are evil. They’re losing their dominance because they are becoming like defeat-prone peoples who rejected God. When you reject God, people you used to dominate, or who had to accept you as equals, begin to dominate you. Consider Samson. Consider the Jews under the Babylonians.

We shouldn’t obsess on the status of whites. We should obsess on the multiplication of the children of God, regardless of their race. Many of us seem to have the idea that God gave us distinctive skins that function as team jerseys or military uniforms. That’s not how it works. The Bible says those who are Spirit-led are the sons of God. If two people are children of God, they are siblings. You shouldn’t stand against your Chinese or African brother when a godless white person opposes him.

A friend of mine likes to use an expression: “Not my circus; not my monkeys.” It means something is amiss, but the people caught up in it are not within your proper sphere of influence. For example, what if your neighbors’ kids amputate their pinkies because they think body modification is cool? Regrettable, but…not your circus; not your monkeys. It’s not your place to put someone else’s teenage kids in a headlock and tell them what to do.

I believe God has a similar outlook. When two groups of godless people fight, God may have very little interest in helping either side. When Antifa battles with a bunch of conservative white nuts who worship false Viking gods, for example, why should God favor either side? They’re someone else’s children.

We seem to be moving to a point where the help God gives conservatives and Americans will be very limited, simply because they are not his children.

There are neighborhoods where cops routinely limit the help they give. Why? Because no one cooperates. Everyone knows who murdered who, but they hate “snitches” too much to talk. It’s no wonder the cops are discouraged. No one likes to be put in situations where nothing they do matters. Surely God must feel the same way when he sees people who have abandoned Christianity battling leftism in carnal ways, for carnal reasons.

I think the problem of white supremacy (like all the faults of white people) is grossly exaggerated, but it exists, and it seems to be getting worse. It’s terrible to see people get caught up in it. God has great things he wants to give ChuckE2009, but right now, he can’t give them to him, because ChuckE2009 is off on a tangent, inspired by the wrong spirits.

Carnal people don’t bear fruit. They don’t get treasure in heaven. They even put themselves in danger of hell.

I’m unhappy about ChuckE2009’s new rants, and I’m also wondering about the other Youtube tool guys he is connected with. He has a popular pal named Stephen Cox, and Cox pals around with guys with channels named Abom79, The Good of the Land, and DoRight Fabrication. There are other channels which are in the same general group: MrPete 222 (“Tubalcain”), Keith Fenner, Keith Rucker, This Old Tony, NYCCNC, Oxtoolco, and Weldingtipsandtricks are among them. Is there a white-separatist undercurrent in the Youtube tool network? I hope not. I really enjoy their videos.

God is going to take his children out of the earth, and it appears clear that he will do it when human beings are too hard-headed to change. When the children of God are no longer able to reach enough people to make our continued presence here a worthwhile investment, God will pull us out, just as American pulled its troops out of Vietnam. It will be good for us, but it will be very bad for the unsaved. We’ll miss the chaos of the full-blown tribulation, and they will miss out on the easy salvation which is available now to all who apply. During the tribulation, to accept salvation will be to invite prison, torture, and murder.

I’m not on board with the carnal conservatives. You can keep Ann Coulter and Breitbart.com (a site built by a man who had no convictions). You can keep the hockey sticks and football helmets. I’m going to sit at home and pray. Maybe I’ll also be used to go out and evangelize one person at a time.

God has shown me some neat stuff. He transformed my dad into a man of love and humility during his last 8 weeks, and he showed me that the man my dad used to be died when my dad was transformed. The Bible says we have an old, carnal man and a new Spirit-led man. My dad survived his old man by several weeks. I have to outlive my old man, too. Now I pray for God to kill Old Steve and give power to New Steve. I use those terms when I pray.

The remarkable thing about this is that it’s another example of God giving my dad fruit. I was amazed when my dad’s story changed other people. I never expected it to change me. I thought I was leading my dad. Now it appears that I will be among my dad’s fruit. That’s as it should be, though. God wants fathers to give their children an inheritance. It’s not normal for children to lead their parents.

One day, God will pull us out, and the world will be full of old men and women brawling on every corner. The circus will continue, and there will be no one to pray for the monkeys.

My advice is this: don’t be a monkey. God isn’t looking for blue-eyed, freckled race warriors, and he isn’t looking for brown-skinned, sexually ambiguous enemies of the Problem of Whiteness. He is looking for children of all types, and you are eligible to join the family.

The Dead Still Have Footprints

I haven’t blogged in three days.

Things keep improving for me. The truly unpleasant stage of grief is behind me. Every so often, something brings a little bit of the grief back. Today I had to cancel my dad’s cell phone account, for example. I had been reluctant to do that. Of course, it was a hassle. Canceling any kind of account is a hassle. They never let you cancel without the customer retention speech. Today the customer rep asked me why I wanted to cancel, and I came up with a brilliant response. In a cheerful voice, I said, “I just want to cancel.” He couldn’t counter that. If he had asked me for details, I would have said, “Well, I have to cancel.”

Little things keep reminding me how difficult caring for my dad was. The actual tasks usually weren’t that hard, but the weight of the responsibility was tremendous.

A short while ago, I drove past a strip mall. It has some sort of operation where seniors go for day care, if I understand the sign correctly. I used to drive past it with my dad, and I would wonder if I should be dropping him at a place like that a few times a week. I never did it. I thought he would find it insulting, and I knew the people would be from a different social class. Maybe I was wrong. Anyway, I don’t think about things like that much any more. They used to weigh on my mind constantly. “Am I doing the right things?” “Am I choosing not to do this because it’s a bad idea, or is it because it will be troublesome for me and expensive?” “When I choose not to act on his complaints, is it because they don’t make sense, or because acting on them would be impractical, or is it mostly to save me aggravation?”

I always wondered if I was doing the right things for him. I also wondered whether I was doing right by myself. It was hard to be sure.

Driving is completely different now. I don’t have my dad’s strange input in my ear. He used to sit beside me and ask me questions. One of the things he asked me about involved the cars we passed. He hated the way people drove with their headlights on in the daytime; it got under his skin for some reason. He would ask me why people had their headlights on, and I would say it was for safety. Then he would start listing his objections, and I would say, “Remember, it wasn’t my idea.” We must have had that conversation more than a hundred times.

While we rode in the car, I tried to talk to him enough to be thoughtful and patient, but not enough to drive myself crazy. Sometimes I realized I was only talking to him when absolutely necessary, and I would try to engage him in order to make up for it.

At some point in 2017, he started asking me to come up with good topics for conversation. He did this mainly in restaurants, while waiting for the food to arrive. I guess the dementia made it hard for him to think of things to talk about. He came to hold me responsible for entertaining him. Trying to cooperate, I would bring things up, and he would dismiss them in a crabby and condescending way. That discouraged me from talking. I realized I couldn’t do what he was asking, because there was no topic that would satisfy him. No matter what I brought up, he would end the conversation quickly.

Every minute I spent with him was work. There was no way to relax or look after myself.

He always paid for lunch. You would think that would be a blessing, but I had to help him to the door. I had to help him sit down and stand up. I had to order for him. If he went to the bathroom, I had to go check on him and hope nothing bad happened. I had to entertain him. Also, his table manners were a problem.

Today, as I drove past the strip mall and the humble day care place, I thought of these things, and I saw how much my life had improved. I was driving home from the grocery, and all I had to think about was getting myself home.

“Humble” is a word that should resonate with all caregivers. The world of seniors who need help is very humbling. They go from performing surgery and writing musical scores to activities like making holiday cards for their loved ones out of glue and construction paper. The whole process is humbling. Very painful to watch.

I have one of those cards. Valentine’s Day. I can’t decide whether I should keep it. Did it mean anything to him when he made it? I doubt it, but I will never know. Maybe he was just following directions to keep the staffers at the ALF happy, or maybe he was thinking about his love for his children.

It was in a drawer in his nightstand when he died, and he had spilled a glass of water on the nightstand, so the card is not in good shape. Did he put it in a drawer because it meant something to him, or did a staffer do it to get it out of the way? No idea.

Of course, when I talk about the stress I used to feel when I was with my dad, I’m thinking of the pre-assisted-living days, before God altered his personality. Once he changed, I looked forward to seeing him. I did limit the time I spent at the ALF, because once I hit two hours, I wanted rest, but I was grateful to be there, and it was very rewarding.

He was wonderful after he changed, but I didn’t drive him much after that, so when I drive, I think about the way he was before he changed, and that makes me recall the stress.

Sometimes I still feel sorry for him, because he was so helpless and dependent, but I keep reminding myself that he’s nothing like that now. I’m feeling sorry for someone who no longer exists and will never exist again. My dad is with Jesus, and he is young and healthy. He doesn’t forget things. He doesn’t fall down. He can’t be sick. He can’t have an injury. He’s full of love, and he is surrounded by love. He’s doing much, much better than I ever have. He must be so happy to be there. My mother must have been beside herself when he appeared to her.

It’s crazy to feel sorry for either of them. I’m the one who still has problems!

Why do we feel sorry for dead people we know are with Jesus? I would trade places in a heartbeat, but the feeling of pity still comes back to me sometimes.

Maybe I made serious mistakes. Maybe I was a jerk sometimes. It’s hard to judge myself accurately. But does it matter? He was content with me, and we were perfectly reconciled when he died. I told him how much I loved him, and I said he was a great dad. I told him he owed me nothing. I made sure he knew there was nothing between us but love. Then he left this cursed world and all of its problems behind. Now no mistake I made matters. He made it! After 87 years of steady work, Satan lost! What does my dad care about what happened on earth? None of that stuff can touch him.

I hate Miami so much I can’t describe it. I’m so glad I left that place. If someone came to me today and said, for example, that one of the major highways there had sunk into the earth, and that traffic in the area would be unbearable for at least three years, it would mean very little to me, because I stay out of Miami. It would be like hearing about a crop blight in Cambodia. I doubt people in heaven sit around stewing about trivial things that happened here on earth.

I suppose it will take me a couple of months to heal, internally. I don’t mean I won’t be happy until then. I’m very happy now. I just mean I need to get over the internal reactions I developed in response to a heavy burden, and I need to stop re-evaluating my performance as a caregiver. Other people will need my help down here. I will apply the lessons I learned from caring for my dad, and I will try not to make mistakes with them.

I forgive myself. What else can I do?

I’m just starting to understand that I can relax. I don’t have to be all over the probate stuff. Nothing has to be resolved this very minute. It doesn’t matter if I take a couple of months or even a year to get it done. No one cares. Virtually everything belongs to me already, there are no other heirs, and there are no significant debts.

I used to be concerned about spending my dad’s cash too freely, because he had money tied up in some properties we needed to dump, and I was reluctant to invade certain accounts. I no longer have to think about conserving my dad’s cash, because everything is mine now. There is no difference between “his money” and “my money,” so I can spend what needs to be spent, without thinking about loans or the threat of unexpected bills for new care.

I can take some time and get my property in order. I’m fixing the yard. I finally got my big chainsaw fixed, so I can move the remaining downed trees that cause problems. I can get the house pressure-cleaned. I bought a harrow, and I used it to dislodge the horrible oak leaves that are ruining the yard. I’ve been picking them up with a yard sweeper and dumping them in the woods. Pretty soon, the grass should start looking like a lawn again.

I have fewer cares. I just need to make my heart understand that.

The other day God gave me this phrase: “Thank you for freeing me from my dad.” That may sound disturbing, but God is always right, and I don’t apologize for anything he says. My dad, the new Christian who was bursting with love, was absolutely wonderful, and I was extremely blessed to have him, but our situation was unsustainable. He couldn’t stay, and I couldn’t keep caring for him, even with the help of the ALF staff. He had to go so I could live. He didn’t give too much up. God had already perfected our relationship, and my dad’s body was beyond help. It was time to leave this life and be born into a new one.

When I put it that way, I almost feel jealous.

These days, I feel my dad’s absence when I pray in the morning. I pray for this one and that one–people I keep on a list–and after that, there’s a hole in my prayers. I used to pray for my dad, but now I can’t. It feels strange, but it reminds me that things have gone very well. There are only two reasons why you can’t pray for someone: either they can’t be saved, or they are doing so well they can’t be blessed any more than they already are. My dad is in the second group. Feeling sorry for him is irrational.

Literally

Although my dad died a few days after giving himself completely to God, and he was demented when he passed, he continues to bear fruit, and I am here to testify.

My friend Amanda has several sons. One is named Sean. After my dad died, her sons were sad, and they wanted to understand. Amanda explained things to them, and Sean decided he wanted to be baptized.

Yesterday, the family came over, and I baptized Sean in the name of Jesus (not the trinity). Before the baptism, I discussed the matter with everyone, and I explained how the world worked. I explained that God had created us, that all human beings were sinners, that Jesus had died and received the punishment for our sins, and that we had to give ourselves to Jesus in order to be forgiven and escape hell. I also told them other things.

I probably shouldn’t list all of the names of Amanda’s sons. There are creepy, misguided people who come here and try to get information on me, and I don’t want them stalking Amanda’s family. I’ll say her oldest son (not Sean) is named Quincy.

Quincy was disturbed, to the point of tears, by what I said. He has some cognitive difficulties I don’t know much about, and he sees the world in an unusual way. He said he couldn’t believe in things he couldn’t see.

I don’t recall exactly what was said after Quincy revealed his issue, but I’m sure I told Amanda we could pray for God to show Quincy he was real, and I know I told her it was acceptable to ask God for faith. We are expected to do that; the Bible says faith comes from God, not us. It’s a gift. It’s listed as a gift of the Holy Spirit in 1 Corinthians 12.

I think Amanda is too reluctant to ask God for things. He lives to give us good things. He knows we don’t deserve it. There would have been no purpose in the crucifixion if we deserved his help. He died for the undeserving, and he knows we can’t fill our own needs. Our natural inclination is to feel we have to prove ourselves and work for things, but these tasks are impossible.

The boys used the pool for a while, and then Amanda took them home. On the way, Quincy looked out the window and saw a very striking cloud formation with the sun’s rays pouring through it. I don’t know how it looked, but Amanda said he was “gobsmacked.” Sean said, “That’s God.” Quincy began smiling, and tears came to his eyes.

If I recall correctly, Amanda says Quincy is more visual than verbal. If so, it makes sense that God would use a visual message to reach him.

She just called and confirmed that. She reminded me that Quincy has a strong interest in the weather, so using a weather phenomenon was a wonderful choice.

If God continues blessing us in such obvious ways, Quincy will probably be baptized soon. I don’t think he’ll rebel, and that’s the big obstacle. It would be great to see him join the family.

I gave Amanda some advice yesterday, and I will pass it on. I don’t know anything about raising kids, but I know a few things that apply, universally, to the upbringing of Christians.

1. Every Christian should have a Bible, and he should read at least a chapter a day. Derek Prince said he started out by treating the Bible like a medicine: he took it three times a day, after meals. If you don’t know the Bible, you will be wide open to attack, and you will believe all sorts of lies. In the Bible, God complains about his people perishing for lack of knowledge. Kids should be required to read the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation. The KJV may be too hard for some kids. Derek Prince likes the NIV, which is easier to read. As long as you don’t get a terrible translation (“God is a woman,” “Karl Marx is Jesus,” “Jesus is just like Buddha,” etc.), you should be okay.

Last night a friend was complaining that he had a short attention span, making reading the Bible from end to end a difficult job. If you can’t make yourself read it through, divide it up. There are 5 books of Moses. Read those first. Then there are the prophets. Then there are what the Jews call “the writings.” Then there is the New Testament. You now have four short works you can read instead of one long one.

You can read the Pentateuch and then the gospels and Acts, if that’s all you can make yourself do. Sooner or later, though, you will have to man up and read everything. You’re not a potted plant. Asking you to read a book is not unreasonable.

2. Families should pray together, especially in the morning. Prayer in tongues is extremely important, and singing in tongues is even more powerful. Every Christian is supposed to have this gift, regardless of what people who haven’t gotten it say in order to justify what has happened to them. Don’t just ask God for things you want. Ask to be changed.

3. Parents should speak blessings over their kids, daily. We have the power to bless and curse, and believe me, people and spirits curse your kids every day. You should be fighting them. The occult has great power, regardless of what most Christians think.

I don’t know how many things I mentioned yesterday, apart from the above, but I can add things here.

4. You need good teaching. It will save you time. Derek Prince is very good, and he’s on Youtube. He may not be 100% right, but he certainly beats most local preachers. Once you get to the point where you are praying in tongues every day, the Holy Spirit will start correcting any errors teachers put in your head.

5. You need good Christian friends, and you should pray for God to send them. Should you belong to a church? Maybe not. Churches are very corrupt these days. They must stink in God’s nostrils. You do need to get together with other Christians, however. If you attend church, be extremely wary of becoming a member, don’t let the pastor become your boss, don’t overdo your donations and volunteer work, and remember that the Holy Spirit, not the pastor, is your best teacher. Churches and pastors are dangerous.

The Bible says we should assemble, but it doesn’t say we should sit in church. You can assemble with other Christians in your backyard or even over the phone.

6. You need to ask God to cut your close ties to unbelievers. This applies to relatives, spouses, business associates, and friends. You should be loving and reasonably friendly to unbelievers and backsliders, but if you allow yourself to partner with people who are in rebellion, it may ruin your life. It’s extremely costly, and if you get into it in spite of God’s warning, he may refuse to help you escape until you’ve spent years in misery.

If you insist on choosing your own associates, you may have awful kids you should never have had. You may be tethered to a mate who is unbearable. You may find yourself involved in business dealings you know are repugnant to God. You will definitely live in a state of siege, with your faith and knowledge under constant attack.

The fact that a person is a Christian doesn’t mean it’s okay to associate with him. Many Christians are cruel, selfish, greedy, and so on. The Bible says you shouldn’t even sit down to eat with them.

You have been warned.

7. You should purge your world of anything that doesn’t fit into a Christian life. Getting rid of cable TV is a great start. Much of secular music is toxic. Astrology has to go; it’s a demonic religion. You also have to stay away from fortune tellers. Absorption in professional sports is evil. There is no way to work weed and other drugs into a godly life. Drunkenness is out. So is gluttony. There are many things that seem innocent to the ignorant, yet which open the doors to problems like illness, mental problems, poverty, divorce, and so on. If you want God’s help, you should be trying to close doors you should never have opened.

8. Do NOT fornicate. We are not under the law, but even the New Testament says we are not to commit sexual sin. The fact that you and your live-in boyfriend go to church together doesn’t begin to make your lifestyle okay. Marry or get your own place, ASAP, and do NOT have children out of wedlock. You will regret it. It’s amazing how many single Christians live together. Where does the Bible say God changed his mind about that?

9. Pray for a long time before ANY major decision. If you take the wrong job or marry the wrong person without prayer, it’s on you, and you will suffer. God isn’t here to make your dumb plans work. He’s here to help you take part in his plans.

10. Do communion often. The point of communion is to search yourself, confess, repent, and renew your covenant with God. Failure to do these things can lead to disease and death. That comes straight from Paul. Read the Bible and understand communion properly. Don’t think you have to find a priest or leave your house. You can do it all by yourself.

I can’t fix all your problems with one blog post, but these things will be very helpful to you.

I don’t know what God is going to do next, but I can’t wait to see it. I’m tired of working, trying to make good things happen. I want the power that created the universe to do things for me and for others. You can have pride; I don’t want it any more. In the long term, it has never brought me anything but failure and sorrow.

Not on This Earth

While my dad was living out his last days, I prayed for him to receive salvation. I also prayed for God to help him bear whatever fruit he could. I was amazed at the way my dad turned to Jesus and escaped damnation. Seeing him bear fruit has been even more surprising.

My friend Mike runs a hospice company. He was so moved by my dad’s story, he made employees read my blog. Mike himself says he wants to be baptized here. When I went to Kentucky to bury my dad, I got to spend hours talking to my aunt and cousin, who needed help with their walks. I got to pray for my cousin’s salvation with her. At the viewing, I shared my dad’s testimony with a number of people, and I was able to counsel a second cousin who apparently knows little about God.

On top of all this, my friend Amanda has a couple of sons who now want to be baptized. She is bringing one of them today. His name is Sean. He has been under attack for years, so he really needs this.

A tormented, demanding relative of Amanda’s erupted last night and insisted she and her sons do a number of menial chores today. Expected. Satan always hates it when someone threatens to make progress in the kingdom of heaven.

I have been fighting the problem in the supernatural, and our power is greater than the power of the children of darkness, so we will win. I believe Sean will be here today.

I would appreciate it if people would pray in support.

Whenever it appears that something good is about to happen, Satan will try to derail the train. It’s such a standard part of his procedure, we should be ashamed when we fail to counterattack in advance. We know it’s coming, yet we usually act surprised. We react instead of attacking first.

I forget to counterattack all the time. I will try to be more responsible in the future. I suggest you do the same. It’s silly to have the same problem over and over and fail to adapt.

I’m wondering what’s going to become of me. As much as I love living where I am, I keep feeling like I won’t be here at the end of 2020. It may be that God put me here to help my dad, Mike, and Amanda. Mike has Ocala connections, and he loves to visit.

If God moves me north, it may mean Florida is in trouble. I think that’s the case, regardless of whether I move. A hurricane moved hundreds of thousands of liberal Puerto Ricans into the state, and we are in the process of restoring voting rights to felons, virtually none of whom are Republicans. We may see disturbing changes in upcoming elections, and after that, Florida may look more like Massachusetts than Florida.

Tennessee appears to be the Idaho of the East. It’s extremely conservative, and it’s full of Christians. One would expect sanity to retain its influence there considerably longer than in other eastern states.

When I left Miami, I knew I would get more land for my money in Ocala. If I leave Ocala, I know I will get more land–and much, much nicer land–in Tennessee for my money. That’s a pleasant thought. I like having 34 acres of sandy land that isn’t totally flat. Having 300 acres of fertile land, in a place where hurricanes don’t hit, with real hills and creeks, would be tremendous.

I know absolutely no one in Tennessee. I don’t know what I could do for God there. I just have a feeling.

A couple of days ago, I saw something neat. I had just returned from Kentucky, via Tennessee. I had veered into the Smokies on the way down, even though it added a lot of time to the trip. I could not resist. I turned on Youtube after I got down here, and I decided to look at the Cardboard Box Church channel, which is my favorite.

The man who runs the channel, Tom Fischer, started out in New Jersey. A year or two ago, he and his wife moved to South Florida. This week, he was teaching in the Smokies! How about that? He would have been very near me, at the same time I was there. Made me wonder if God was telling me something.

I replaced my copies of the first three Foxfire books this week. These are books about Appalachian life. A teacher tried to engage students in Rabun Gap, in northern Georgia, and he couldn’t get anywhere, so he started a magazine. The students did the work. At first, it was a relatively useless poetry magazine, but later, it focused on the heritage of Appalachian heritage. They interviewed old people. They wrote about things like killing hogs and building log cabins.

When I was a kid, my mother loved the first Foxfire book, and I ended up owning several volumes. They were eaten by ants (long story), so I don’t have my old copies. Now that I have new ones, I’m enjoying them. They can be helpful with things I don’t remember fully. Georgia is not Kentucky, but the similarities outweigh the differences.

Am I training for my return “home”? I don’t know.

Last night I searched Youtube for videos about Appalachia. I found a video featuring Charles Kuralt. It was shot in 1965. It was about Christmas in a poor area in Kentucky.

Kuralt showed a shot of the local post office. It said “Roxana.” My second cousin used to run that post office. My grandfather is buried near Roxana. I was startled. I hadn’t realized the area where my dad’s people lived was that poor.

Actually, now that I think about it, it wasn’t that poor. Kuralt focused on some shacks belonging to people who couldn’t get it together. I remember visiting nearby Whitesburg when I was a kid, and while it wasn’t Monaco, people had real houses and cars and so on. It wasn’t terrible.

Could it be that a liberal journalist twisted the truth? That would be incredible. Kuralt was a very deceitful person, so I guess I shouldn’t be shocked.

Maybe the area wasn’t totally hopeless, but there were plenty of people there who didn’t do well.

There was a kid in the video whose clothes were so bad he couldn’t go to school. There was a man who lived in a shed behind his ex-wife’s house because he couldn’t afford to move. Another man dug coal in a mine behind his house, not for money, but to heat his family’s home.

It was distressing. Everyone in the neighborhood was on welfare. They lived on “commodity” food, which is what people in Kentucky call surplus products provided as handouts. “Government cheese” and so on. That cheese is really good, by the way.

I felt bad for them, and I felt very grateful for what I have. I wondered what God would have done for them, had they known him better. Poverty is not normal; it’s a curse, like cancer or autism. We’re not supposed to be poor.

The more I thought about it, the more I thought the people were to blame. You don’t have to stay in a poor area if you don’t want to. My dad moved to Florida. My great uncle moved to Indiana. His son worked in Detroit, designing giant machine tools for making car engines. Eastern Kentucky has poured migrants into a number of states, and those people have done well. You can’t expect Uncle Sam to support you forever because you refuse to move from a blighted region.

My dad always said he thought the geography was what doomed Eastern Kentucky. It’s largely vertical. Building isn’t easy. Making roads is hard. Large-scale farming is not practical. There are lots of places where making money is easier.

Another problem is that the people resist learning. There is no excuse for illiteracy in America, and there hasn’t been for at least a hundred years. If you know how to read and do math, you can teach your kids by writing in the dirt. It’s not that hard. My mother taught me to read in her spare time.

Fundamentally, every problem boils down to a poor relationship with God. I shouldn’t get caught up in the physical manifestations.

I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I have tremendous confidence in God’s willingness to put me in a good place.

I suppose I should clean bird cages and get the house ready for my guests. I am eager to see Sean get to know God and find out what it is to live in victory and peace. If you’re praying for us, thank you. It’s very important. Prayer isn’t just a gesture. It has more power than anything else we do.

My Ride is Now Legal

I had a wonderful experience today at the tax collector’s office, better known in other states as the DMV.

No one has a good time at the DMV, or so you would think. But I did. I was there for at least two hours, and I was thrilled to be there.

Today I got back on the job of getting my dad’s estate probated. I redrafted my initial filing, and I tried to file it using the state’s court efiling system. It was no use. The correct options simply did not exist on the website. I had to call the court clerk so a lady there could walk me through it. Annoying, but this is how courts are.

While I was talking to her, she asked if I was doing formal probate or summary administration. I had assumed that the correct thing was to get probate started and then petition for summary administration but oh, no. I was wrong. They want you to do it up front. Or at least this lady does, and since she rules the office, that’s good enough for me.

Filing lawsuits is very straightforward; I can file a lawsuit in half an hour. Probate, which should be simpler, is full of irritating twists and turns. I am very open to tips from people in the clerk’s office. They deal with this stuff every day.

I told her the estate was some junk and a used car, indicating it was suited to summary administration, and she told me I could transfer the title to the car at the tax collector’s office before fooling with probate. That blew my mind. It makes no sense at all. You can get a vehicle exempted from probate, but how can you do that if probate hasn’t started?

Here’s something I’ve learned: when someone who works in a courthouse tells you something wonderful, you don’t question it. You run with it. They can’t give you legal advice, but they can give you help with procedure, which can be just as valuable. I decided to see if I could get the title transferred at the tax collector’s office.

I called the tax collector, and they told me I could get the title changed with a non-certified copy of the will plus a death certificate. It seemed too good to be true.

I got these items together, and off I went. I also took a copy of the car’s registration, figuring it couldn’t hurt. It had the car’s VIN on it, and it might help the tax people find the car in their system.

Before I went in, I spoke God’s opposition to the difficulty of getting the job done. I spoke his help to me and his opposition to the spirits and people who were against me. I know how things work.

When I got there, the spirits of bureaucracy unleashed hell. I was supposed to have proof of insurance. I needed proof the estate was going to go through summary administration, which meant I needed a signed document from the lawyer doing the probate work. There was also some question as to whether they should give me the car without proof my mother was dead. What?

Basically, I needed a lot of stuff the lady on the phone didn’t mention. That’s my description of the natural problems I faced. As a Christian, I saw a wall of annoying strongholds.

I told the clerk I was an attorney, and I was handling the estate. This is true. I said I could stand there and write out a document, in longhand, stating that I intended to use summary administration. She went for it. In fact, she produced a form, and I signed it. HA. Sometimes it’s nice to be a lawyer.

She waited while I went to the car for the proof of insurance. Unbelievably, I hadn’t updated it. I had papers for 2017. Then I remembered…I had a phone. I signed into my dad’s insurance company’s website, and I pulled up his policy. I clicked the link to download a PDF of proof of insurance. It refused to display. There was no way to get it to work. After about 5 minutes of this, I went in to see if merely showing her the website would work.

She was way ahead of me. She produced a form saying the car was insured. I signed. God bless her.

Technically, there was a problem with the form. The FDOT (Florida Department of Transportation) is moderately insane, and they don’t make allowance for the fact that one person can’t insure another person’s property. The form said I was the owner, and that the car was insured. I explained, a bit too honestly, that it didn’t make sense to say I was the owner and had insurance when 1) I wasn’t the registered owner yet, and 2) the insurance was in my dad’s name, presumably making the estate the insured. There was also a possibility that the car was not insured; maybe the policy contained language saying the policy ended with the insured’s death.

In this particular universe, where the rules of logic apply, there was no way to sign that form and be totally comfortable about it, but I had come to understand that the system was screwed up, so I signed. I looked at it this way: under the law, I became the owner of the car at the instant my dad died. That’s how wills work. Registration is proof of ownership, but ownership itself transfers at death. I really was the owner, and as far as I knew, it was okay for the estate to have insurance on the car.

If car policies terminated with death, it would cause no end of problems, and I don’t think the government would stand for it. What if you have a fatal accident, and your car is drivable, and your brother comes to drive it home? Is the estate supposed to pay $500 for a tow? I doubt it.

Whatever. I may be mistaken, but I’m not a perjurer, and that’s what counts.

The clerk looked up my FDOT account, and she found I had a credit for a license tag I didn’t use. She did that all on her own, without being prompted. I didn’t have to pay for a new tag. Sweet.

On top of that, she gave me candy.

You may be wondering why all this took two hours. You would have to ask the FDOT. The clerk spent a great deal of time staring at her computer, waiting for information to come up and entering data. It was ridiculous.

On top of that, I renewed my driver’s license while I was there, and it took a while because I had to sign an affidavit saying I refused to be an organ donor. I have been in enough hospitals to know there is a culture of death in those places, and I am not anxious to have a pillow put over my face so some stranger can have my tonsils. I would rather have a kid go without a kidney a while longer than be unplugged prematurely by an SJW in scrubs. Disease and death are natural parts of life; being offed by overzealous doctors and nurses is not.

No one wants my organs or any other part of me right now. They never have, really. I find it hard to believe they will want them after I’m smooshed in a wreck.

In typical Christian fashion, I was hit with stronghold after stronghold, but God showed me a way through each one, and he gave me favor (which I prayed for).

When I got home, I got on the computer and added the car to my insurance policy. Now, no matter what my status was on the drive home, I am legit.

The estate has been reduced, basically, to a bunch of junk you might expect to see at a garage sale. My dad didn’t have a lot of personal property. Not after I threw out his awful furniture and 1970’s wardrobe back in Miami.

I am very happy. Two hours at the tax collector’s office beat months of probate, any day. I did not want to involve the car in probate because I fully intend to use it. My other four-wheeler is a giant diesel truck, and it’s not nearly as convenient. After driving the truck for 8 years, the SUV I inherited feels as nimble as a go-kart. I love parking it.

Far as I can tell, the transfer is legal and final. If the clerk and I made any errors, they can be fixed by the court.

My impression is that no one in the government really wants to be involved any more than they have to. I don’t think they plan to put me on the rack and question everything I do. I have a one-beneficiary will and a tiny estate. There is no one to cheat.

If I had filed in Miami, I probably would have been dealing with an impatient clerical with little interest in helping me. Some of the courthouse clericals there are okay, some are on the useless side, some are resentful and passive-aggressive, and some are like rabid animals. I don’t think anyone there would have been helpful at all. As for the tax collectors, I don’t even want to think about it. I would be lucky to get one who spoke English. You know what they call you when your name is Stephen? “Teabag.” Either that or “Estefeng.”

I’ve seen some real beauties in the federal courthouse in Miami. I dealt with one clerk who appeared to be furious that I had shown up. She had an inexplicable expression of hatred on her face, and she snapped at me when I talked to her, as if I were asking pointed questions about her sexual history. I also had a run-in with a federal marshal whose gossiping nearly made me late filing a document; I had given myself an hour to make the 20-minute drive, but I had gotten caught in a traffic jam. When I told him I was in a hurry because my client was facing a deadline, he decided the best move was to give me a slow lecture explaining why running his mouth by the metal detector was more important than filing a document on time. I wrote the chief judge about that jewel.

What a difference it makes, living in an area with nice Christian people, or, more to the point, not in Miami. What a miserable hole of a city.

I can never thank God enough for getting me out of there.

Things are going well. I credit God. My prayer life is going better, and even though I love and miss my dad, I was carrying him in the supernatural, and it held me back.

Never, ever get too close to an unsaved person. It may take you years to get out of the pit. It may well be that if I had avoided getting too close to my dad, I would have been stronger spiritually and could have helped him get salvation decades earlier.

He will be the last one. No more unequal yokings. You can be a friendly acquaintance I see from time to time. You can be an old friend or relative I don’t spend much time with. No problem. But if you’re not with Jesus, you can’t be closely involved with me. Not in business, and not in my personal life. It causes too many problems, and if I show that I haven’t learned my lesson, God will make me regret it.

“I’ll Take a Double Room and Some Leftist Indoctrination”

I have more to write about my trip to Kentucky.

Today I fired up Youtube to watch during breakfast, and I chose a Derek Prince video about the Antichrist. I had seen it before, but that didn’t matter.

Prince, a scholar of Greek, taught something important: the prefix “anti” means “against,” but it also means “instead of.”

For a long time, I’ve been writing about what I call “the alternative righteousness.” Leftists (there isn’t much point in distinguishing leftism from enmity to God) are attacking the children of God forcefully these days, and two prongs of the attack are the alternative righteousness and the incessant accusation of the church.

It’s a smart strategy. If Satan gives us an Antichrist who looks like a monster and tells us he’s out to get us, we will be reluctant to worship him. Instead, he’s going to give us a warm, fuzzy guy–probably sexually ambiguous–who will teach us that we can live in love and peace without Christianity (and with a heavy emphasis on the acceptance of homosexuality).

Years ago, God told me Satan’s children would use homosexuality as a club to beat the church, and at the time, very few people saw the threat. Look where we are now. You can be turned down when you apply for college admission or a job because you oppose sexual sin. It’s not enough to leave sexual deviants alone and treat them with kindness; you’re not allowed to have an opinion they don’t like.

My friend Travis, a young black man, is house-sitting for me in Miami. The other day, there was a homosexual pride march in that city. People who wanted to march did so and left everyone else alone, right? No, they badgered them and asked them why they weren’t marching. Travis’s friends bugged him about it, and he told them he wasn’t on board. In all likelihood, that will be remembered, and it will eventually be used against him.

Many Christians have failed in their obligation to treat sinners (other sinners) compassionately in the past, and many of us still fail. Most of us do a fairly good job, but the left accuses all of us anyway. They tell the world we are the reason there is tension over the issue of sexual preference, and they teach that getting rid of Christians who oppose sexual sin will bring peace and tolerance.

Of course, anyone who knows leftists knows that leftism is about hatred, murder, covetousness, and oppression. People who vote for candidates like Obama and Clinton may not see themselves as agents of oppression; they just want free stuff taken from other people. They ignore the fact that their movement has caused more misery and death than any other. Leftism may start out with mild measures, but in the end, it ramps up and leads to totalitarianism and poverty.

Leftism is the perfect system for the Antichrist, because it attempts to set the government, which he will lead, up as the Messiah. Have babies whose fathers don’t want to support them? Messiah Government will feed them. Having a hard time succeeding because your work ethic is poor? Messiah Government will take from people who work and give to you. Messiah Government will give you EBT cards without making a real effort to find out if you deserve them. It will give you Section 8 housing. It will send the police to your home over and over to help you behave and to protect your kids from you.

I shouldn’t say people fail because their work ethic is poor. It’s true that lazy people generally fail, but the world is full of hard-working people who are poor. The real reason people fail is that they don’t have good prayer lives. I may say I do this or that for a living, but when my Christian friends ask, I say I pray for a living.

The Antichrist and his flock tell us they care more about people than Christians do. It’s not true; conservatives give more to charity than leftists, even though we are less wealthy. Still, it’s what the masses are told, and because very few people pray in tongues, people are gullible, and they believe it.

Prayer in tongues will lead you out of deception. I have believed some awful doctrine in the past. I believed the prosperity gospel, for example. It wasn’t until God helped me pray in tongues for a couple of hours every day that I saw through the lies. If you’re not praying in tongues, your root in God is short, so any wind that blows can push you over.

It’s amazing how easily we give up on God when we deny the Holy Spirit. We’re supposed to be baptized with the Holy Spirit, but generally, we’re not. It’s not the same thing as water baptism. If we were Spirit-led, praying in tongues and repenting and so on, we would be powerful. We would see miracles all the time. We would be able to help people with things like the curse of poverty, the curse of disease, and the curse of sexual perversion. Most denominations reject the Holy Spirit, so Christians are weak and less loving than they should be. When unbelievers turn to us for answers, we are usually unable to help. No wonder they’re looking for a new husband.

If we were doing what we should, power and love would flow through us, and people would throng to us to be changed. The Antichrist would have real competition.

As it stands, we are very good at saying “no,” but we’re not great at saying “yes.” We can tell people they’re wrong to live in sexual sin. We can tell them it’s a sin to take drugs or to drink or eat excessively. On the other hand, we generally can’t get them delivered from the habits that make them do these things. They see the poor results we offer, and they assume Christianity is a false religion.

Anyone with any common sense can see that it’s crazy, silly, and pathetic for two men to sleep together, but when such men can’t find deliverance, it’s only natural that they would give up and decide that what they’re doing must be right. I would do the same thing. If it were wrong, surely God would help them, right?

Satan has pulled our teeth, rendering us powerless, and now that we are weak, he is offering his own solutions. Tempted? Give in! If you’re abnormal, we’ll just change normal.

While I was traveling, I watched TV in a hotel. I saw a remarkable promotion for the alternative righteousness. You would think it would be sufficient for a hotel chain to provide access to programming, but they went beyond that. While I went through menus to get to Youtube, they showed a video of their own, over and over.

A black woman is stranded in a broken-down car in the rain. There is no husband around, but let’s not go there. Does she call her insurance company, the police, or AAA? No, she calls her hotel. A woman (not a man) who appears to be Chinese shows up in a car and drives her to the hotel. The hotel’s employees say comforting things to her. In the background, we hear platitudes about love and making the world a cozier, comfier place.

What does this have to do with renting rooms?

Notice an important thing about the video: white men are in the background. The woman in the car is trying to use a machine invented by white men, on a road built by white men, patrolled by police who are mostly white men, but forget that. Her savior is a Chinese lady who didn’t do well enough in school to get a job better than hotel clerk.

I think I know why leftists are so eager to demonize and trivialize white people. We have done more than anyone else to spread the gospel.

The Bible says the Jews are the light of the world. Jews are Caucasians. There are swarthy Jews in the Mideast, but they’re still Caucasians, and most of us would call them white. The gospel of Jesus Christ has been spread, and continues to be spread, chiefly by whites. Unless the church in China explodes, that will probably be true until Jesus returns.

We’re not better than other people, but as long as we are the primary proponents of salvation, we are more dangerous to Satan. It makes sense that Satan would try to convince his children that we cause all the problems in the world, and that we need to be controlled or exterminated.

Black slaves were sold to slave traders by African Muslims. Alex Haley lied when he wrote about white men jumping off boats and kidnapping people one at a time. Chinese communists killed tens of millions of people without white help. Africans and Indians treat each other extremely badly, in countries white people don’t rule. During World War Two, the Japanese were so vicious and barbaric, they sometimes offended Nazis. Right now, in the United States, the biggest threat to a black person’s existence is other black people, and the biggest threat to a white person’s existence is black people and Hispanics, at least when it comes to crime.

We didn’t invent evil. We didn’t invent racism. We didn’t invent genocide. We don’t cause all of the world’s problems. Get rid of us, and things will probably be worse than they are right now.

These things are true, yet somehow we are portrayed as predators and slave masters. Leftists treat us the way Nazis treated Jews in propaganda films and posters.

They are not ashamed to say “the problem of whiteness.” That’s amazing.

We’re not a problem. We invented calculus. We invented the automobile. We gave the world electricity. We did most of the work in creating modern medicine. We taught the world how to grow food efficiently. We spread the gospel. You would think someone would have noticed.

I won’t say the Messiah came from us. He was a Caucasian, but he was probably so dark it would have been iffy to call him “white.” David and Noah were white, however, and it may be that Jesus was, too.

Satan is doing a great job, setting the world up for the brief rule of the Antimessiah. He has drugged and muzzled the sheepdogs, and he has provided his own path to earthly nirvana stocked with poisoned bon-bons.

It’s a fascinating thing to watch.

I can tell you what I expect to happen.

1. Hatred and persecution of Christians will become very open, the majority will take it up, and the government will back it.

2. Whites and straight males will be included because the enemy identifies us with Christianity.

3. Leftists will promote the alternative righteousness on a larger and larger scale. “Love” will become an obsession, and we will see public events dedicated to the celebration of non-Christian “love.” Speakers will tell us how wrong Christian love is, and they will persuade the masses to give it up. They can’t get us to give up Christianity and support sexual deviation unless they can give us a substitute that sort of feels like Christianity.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we started seeing “Christian” terrorists, shooting up public places. That would certainly be helpful to Satan’s campaign.

One white “Christian” terrorist proves Christianity and white people are bad, but tens of millions of dead victims just prove socialism is a great thing that needs a few adjustments.

This is a good time for Christians to move farther away from cities. Leftists are lazy, and they will attack their neighbors before they start getting in buses to come after the rest of us.

We need to get the baptism with the Holy Spirit. We need to pray in tongues a lot, every day. We need to ask God to move in us so we are purged of hate and anger and so we can be filled with love. We need to get him to deliver sinners through us so people will realize they are wrong to give up on him.

It’s nice to own guns and all that, but we can’t save ourselves with them. I think God is moving us to buy guns so we can protect ourselves while we develop supernatural weapons and supernatural good character. When the final confrontation comes, I think he’ll tell us to lay down our guns and surrender from a position of peace. I think anyone who advises others to make a ridiculous last stand, shooting at waves of approaching leftists, is working for Satan.

If we lay down our weapons, we will show leftists we’re not like them. We’ll show them we trust in God, not carnal tools. We can’t glorify God by fighting Satan’s children physically. We have to step back and let God do the fighting. The Bible says vengeance is his.

Why would you want to soil yourself with physical violence? I’m tired of this world. If misguided leftists will execute me quickly and give me an excuse to leave and let them wallow in their folly without my continued assistance, I will not be strongly tempted to shoot at them.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the baptism with fire. John said Jesus would baptize us with it. I have wondered what it was, and I have had a sneaking suspicion that made me uncomfortable. I think that suspicion is correct. I think the baptism with fire is a succession of problems a Christian has to defeat by repenting and getting closer to God.

I wish it were something more pleasant.

The Bible speaks of gold refined by the fire. I think that’s us.

Guess what? The Bible confirms it. I checked. Here is what Peter said:

In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while, if need be, you have been grieved by various trials, that the genuineness of your faith, being much more precious than gold that perishes, though it is tested by fire, may be found to praise, honor, and glory at the revelation of Jesus Christ, whom having not seen you love. Though now you do not see Him, yet believing, you rejoice with joy inexpressible and full of glory, receiving the end of your faith—the salvation of your souls.

Many Christians have found that their troubles increased, at least temporarily, after they turned to God in earnest. I believe this is the baptism with fire. If you respond by defending yourself and denying your sins and iniquities, the fire keeps burning. If you confess and repent, God leads you into peace. This is my best guess. It seems to be what’s happening to me.

If you remain determined to fight leftists in carnal ways, I suppose God will leave you trapped in that battle until you wise up.

You need to snap out of your slumber and listen to people who are hearing from God. When things get bad, if you haven’t listened, God may not listen to your cries for help. The Jews who got out of Germany and Austria in 1935 fared a lot better than the ones who stayed and assumed things would work out. Develop a relationship with God now, while the storm is still a little ways off. It takes time to make Christianity work for you, so last-minute bandwagon-jumpers will suffer much more than they should.

Plus Ham Info

I am trying to avoid getting back into cooking, because the love of pleasure is a bad thing, and I have been gluttonous in the past. Nonetheless, I keep getting ideas whether I want them or not, and I’m glad I’ve developed a collection of my own recipes.

Today I decided to make a few biscuits. I was out of bread because of the trip, and I didn’t want to drive to McDonald’s for breakfast. I found a recipe I created a few years back, and I decided to try it.

The biscuits were very good. They’re certainly better than any homemade biscuits anyone else has made for me. I think they can be better, though. Let’s face it; McDonald’s and Chick-fil-A make really good biscuits, and the rest of us should be up to their standard. Here’s the recipe, as it stands after today:

INGREDIENTS

1 3/4 cups biscuit flour (not self-rising)
1/4 cup starch
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tbsp. sugar
4 tsp. baking powder (not soda)
3/4 cup buttermilk
2 tbsp. bacon grease
2 tbsp. butter

A little starch makes the biscuits less rubbery; biscuits shouldn’t feel like bread. The sugar isn’t there to make them sweet. It’s just enough to round out the flavor. Chick-fil-A uses a great deal of sugar in its biscuits. Too much.

The important thing is to burn and chill the butter. You can put it in the microwave in a Pyrex cup and burn it a little. You don’t need the junk that settles out. Combine 2 tablespoons of lightly burned butter with 2 tablespoons of bacon grease and chill it until it’s solid. Burning the butter a little gives it a lot of flavor. Bacon grease makes the biscuits flaky.

It’s a lot of trouble, but you have to ask yourself whether you want good biscuits or amazing biscuits.

You mix the dry ingredients and then cut the fat in until you have crumbs. Mix the buttermilk in, roll the biscuits out, and bake them at 450 for around 13 minutes.

The only thing I’m not thrilled about is the texture of the tops of the biscuits. I think I know what to do. McDonald’s brushes biscuits with melted butter. I think that’s the answer. I don’t know when I’ll make biscuits again, but when I do, this is what I’ll do.

My grandmother used to put a small amount of grease on top of her biscuits before baking. I’ve tried this, and the fat disappears into the biscuit. Sorry, Granny.

Baking at 450 seems to be important. I used to bake biscuits at 400, but it’s a mistake.

You may not need to use all of the buttermilk, because the actual amount of flour and starch you measure may vary. Truthfully, flour should always be weighed, not measured in cups. When you use a cup, you will get inconsistent results because the flour may be compacted to different degrees. You won’t know how much flour you’re getting. Weighing is the way to go. Use a gram scale. They’re cheap. I need to correct this recipe and turn the flour and buttermilk measurements into weights. It would also be helpful for the hard fat, because it’s not easy to get hard fat into a cup.

You can’t throw up your hands at grams and weighing, just because your great aunt measured everything with a coffee cup with a broken handle. Tradition is great, but being stupid is never a good thing. Your great aunt may also have used a stove heated by burning wood, and you don’t do that. I hope.

This recipe is a work in progress. I don’t know when I’ll be completely satisfied.

I’ve been Googling around, and it appears it’s possible to cure a country ham at home. You have to have a fridge where it can stay for a few months, but after that, the cure keeps it preserved, so you can hang it anywhere. I may try it, if I can get my grandmother’s recipe. There are two kinds of hams available commercially: expensive ones, and bad ones. The real thing at a decent price would be better.

She used to keep saltpeter in her kitchen, so I think that’s what she used instead of pink salt. We used to think she bought it to put in my grandfather’s food, but maybe that wasn’t the case.

Things are going very well today. I have already been used to help two people for God, and it’s not even 11 a.m. Can’t complain about that.

Yesterday a wonderful thing happened. I felt tempted to do something stupid, and God helped me. I was getting close to home on the drive south, and I kept feeling temptation. I used my supernatural tools, and it seemed like I wasn’t winning. Eventually, I spoke God’s help and victory to me, and I spoke his opposition to the people and spirits that were against me.

It was raining very hard when I approached the house. I turned into my driveway, and I pushed the button on the gate remote. Nothing happened. At the same time, I got a message from my phone, saying the power at the house was out. No power, no gate. There was no way I was getting out to climb the fence in the rain.

I reported the outage by phone, and when I checked, the online map only showed one tiny outage in the whole county.

After a while, a pickup showed up, and a man from the power company approached my car. He said he had looked at all the lines near my house, and he couldn’t see anything wrong. He said he was going to turn the power back on in a few minutes.

After another 10 minutes or so, my phone told me the power was on, and I went in. The temptation was gone, and I was fine.

This experience was neat in more than one way. First, it showed that God was really there. He came through for me, fast. Second, it showed that speaking things into existence works, when you do it in accordance with God’s will. It’s a very powerful thing. Third, God did everything for me. He was glorified. I would have failed without him.

This is the kind of Christianity I want. I don’t mind failing and having God take over and give me victory. It’s how things are supposed to be. We’re told to glorify Jesus all the time. That only makes sense if we’re glorifying him for things he does. He would not ask us to glorify him for things we do using willpower. It would be stealing.

When you say, “Glory to Jesus,” you’re really saying, “This is not my job. Jesus will have to do it, and he gets the credit.” Churches have taught us to be tough little soldiers who lift themselves by their own bootstraps, but that’s what the Jews who rejected Jesus taught. It’s pride, and God hates pride. The Bible says God will fight you if you’re proud.

I feel much closer to God today. I feel his reality more intensely, and it’s paying off.

I’m also much less stressed than I was while my dad was alive. Back then, I knew Christians were supposed to have peace, but I couldn’t hold onto it. I was in an unequal yoking I had chosen years before. I chose physics and law and my dad’s company over God, so I had to spend years being pulled out of that mess. I sleep better now. I don’t feel the worry I had to fight last month. I can’t tell you how great it is.

When you get into something God doesn’t want you to be part of, he may not deliver you quickly. You may get a sentence of many years. This is especially true when you marry or reproduce outside of God’s will. I’m lucky it was a parent who didn’t have long to live. What if I had a crazy wife with 40 more years left on her clock?

My dad was transformed at the end, and he became a wonderful father, but that amounted to about a month and a half. Before that, there was always tension.

A real Christian doesn’t get puffed up and tell everyone what he does for God and how “sold out” he is. A real Christian is like a 35-year-old man who lives by taking money from his mother’s purse. God gives us charity, not wages. We are the reason he was crucified. We haven’t earned anything good. If our work pays off, it’s only because God chose to allow it. Many people work hard and fail.

God taught me to say I’m “pleased,” not “proud.” After he taught me that, I thought of the baptism of Jesus. God spoke, and he didn’t say he was proud of Jesus. He said he was “well pleased.”

We have been taught to be self-reliant because our ancestors could not get God’s help and could not teach us how to get it, either.

I think worry will continue to wither.

I don’t know if I’ll go ahead with the ham project or not. Something to think about. I sent an email to a local grocery company to see if they sell uncured hams. If I follow through, I will write about it here.

I Begin Life on my Own

I made it back from Kentucky this afternoon. My dad’s viewing was on Friday, and he was buried on Saturday.

The first place where I had a meal outside of Florida was a Chick-fil-A in Georgia. I went to several Chick-fil-A’s on the trip. They treat customers so nicely, it made me feel better about everything. The first one I visited had fresh flowers on every table.

This, and not the food, is why Chick-fil-A dominates. People who hate Christianity will never understand that. Every employee is required to demonstrate an attitude based in Christianity.

The first place where I stayed was in Ooltewah, Tennessee. Very nice hotel, and very quiet. They had tourist brochures. I couldn’t resist taking one to read. Rock City. When I was a kid, and we drove to Kentucky or North Carolina, we passed endless mailboxes, barns, and outhouses bearing painted messages that read, “See Rock City.” My dad never stopped! I still wonder what I missed. He said it was a tourist trap. I forgive him, though.

I nearly took a side trip to another attraction, the Lost Sea, just to get a shirt. My dad actually let us see that one.

My caregiving experiences took over my life, and my blog reflects that. I don’t want to spend the next year as The Grief Blogger, trying to get sympathy from as many strangers as possible. Healthy people get over family deaths. They don’t milk them. I will try to keep that in mind as things wind down, but I still have a few things to say.

While my dad was going through his astonishing transformation, I routinely prayed for God to help him bear whatever fruit he could during his remaining days. God has been faithful to answer. Even before I left Florida, two boys who heard my dad’s story decided they wanted me to baptize them. My friend Mike, the hospice exec, sent employees to read my blog. In Kentucky, God added two more people to the list of those affected: my aunt and my cousin.

I will call my aunt Thelma and my cousin Louise in order to have names for them.

Thelma has been through a lot. She divorced young, and the aftermath was unpleasant. She has had a lot of anger and trials. Louise has also had problems. Her dad died in 2017, and it appears that she inherited very little. She says her brother and stepbrothers got what would otherwise have come to her. Her health is not good, and she has a son who has a serious heart defect. Things are not going well for her financially, and she hasn’t had a good relationship with God.

My mother’s parents had 8 grandchildren, and for some reason, two of them–Louise and my cousin JD–got much less attention than the rest of us. It’s a mysterious thing. I don’t know if they felt unwanted, but it always seemed like no one wanted to fuss over them the way they did over the rest of us.

Thelma had a stroke not long ago. I didn’t know about it. The family was blown apart by my grandparents’ failure to do proper estate planning, and by the way some people behaved after my grandparents died (If anyone I know is reading this, no, I did not get any of the good stuff), so communication is not what it used to be. That’s as much my fault as anyone else’s. She doesn’t appear to have any lingering effects from the stroke, but Louise is looking after her anyway.

Louise feels that Thelma, who was responsible for bringing her up as a Christian, focused too much on God’s anger and the end times. It turned her off and discouraged her. On my first night in Kentucky, the three of us talked until it was very late, and I told both of them as much as I could of what I had learned about God.

Louise has been hurt a lot, but she doesn’t seem bitter at all. She is very open to establishing a relationship with God. Before I left Kentucky, she let me pray for her, and we asked God to give her faith and show her he was real. I believe that was night before last. The seed was planted. Now I’m waiting to see what sprouts.

It’s a real privilege to be used to help someone in my family. Most of them won’t want my help (or anyone else’s) in the area of religion. For some reason, my relatives seem to think I’m stupid, even though I’m the most highly educated person in the family. I admit, I’m eccentric, but so are almost all of them. If my grandparents or any of their daughters had had a child that wasn’t eccentric, they probably would have taken it back to the hospital, fearing it had been switched.

You know what Jesus said. “A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house.” I’m not saying I’m a prophet; I’m just citing a principal that applies to all people, in every area of life. We tend to dishonor capable people who are close to us. Oddly, we tend to honor outright fools instead.

The viewing was strange, but I thought it was great.

Including myself and the funeral director and his wife, there were 11 people. One cousin couldn’t make it because his boss wouldn’t turn him loose. One lives in Illinois and may have been busy; I haven’t heard from him, but he sent some nice flowers. My sister didn’t respond to my efforts to communicate with her. One aunt didn’t go because she was having blinds installed, and her husband stayed with her. I think everyone else is dead.

My understanding is that people from the town where my mother was born–the town where my dad was to be buried–had a gabfest about my dad’s death on Facebook, so I was afraid there might be more people than I could handle, but that didn’t pan out. I have deleted my dad’s Facebook account, so I don’t know what has been happening.

There was no church funeral. I was very tired, and I had no help, so I kept things simple. Thelma and Louise would have helped round up musicians and so on, but I figured very few people would come, and I didn’t want to put the burden on them. I decided to have a viewing and then say a few words at the grave.

I got some photos printed at Walgreen’s before I left. One showed my dad at the assisted living facility, eating brownies I made for him. The other was a photo of the life jacket God used to try to get his attention. I put these photos up beside my dad’s Amazon urn, and I hung the life jacket on a rack meant for flowers. I knew it was an eccentric thing to do, but I didn’t care. It was my show. I felt like the little red hen, eating her bread by herself.

The photos looked very good. Walgreen’s had some nice frames for $12.99 each, but they screwed up when I went to get my photos, and I had to wait a long time, so an employee gave them to me for $10.00 apiece. I intend to keep them, even though I bought them in a hurry.

I told everyone about the life jacket miracles, and I told them how God had changed my dad toward the end. I gave them as much of his testimony as I thought they would tolerate. I’m satisfied. It was a precious opportunity to share important knowledge. I suppose most of the people I talked to won’t be changed, but a few may. I’m not responsible for the way people take the things I say, but I do have an obligation to say them.

Beside the grave, I reminded everyone that God is very real, and that he is there for everyone. I tried to make them understand how important it was to get to know him. I probably offered to help; I don’t recall. I would say the whole thing lasted 6 or 7 minutes.

There were two attendees I didn’t expect to see. They’re my second cousins. One was a judge, and the other works for the courts. I’ll call them George and Ruth. Their mother was a remarkable lady. It seemed like there was nothing she couldn’t do. My grandfather was a circuit judge, and she was his right arm for years. He would have been lost without her. My mother and father took her with them on a trip to Europe, along with my Aunt Jean. I suppose their branch of the family was the closest to ours.

They couldn’t have been nicer to me, not that I should have been surprised. That’s the kind of people they are. I expected my dad’s passing to be ignored by nearly everyone, but my cousins brought food for everyone, and I’ll tell you something else they did. It may be a private matter, but I don’t care. George gave me a card, and inside the card was a check for $100.00 for burial expenses. I couldn’t believe it. I do not need the money, and I didn’t even know, or send anything, when his mother died.

I got to talk to George about God before I left. We were all sitting in the kitchen at the funeral home, eating the food he and Ruth had brought, and I tried to give him as much information as I could in a short time. I learned that he hadn’t been taught a lot about God, so I tried to steer him away from some traps. I have been praying for him. I hope for the best.

I have learned some disappointing things about other members of my family. Apparently, they worked against George when he ran for re-election. After all his mother did for my grandfather, that was disgraceful. I had heard something about it in the past, but because of my familiarity with the rumor mill and its reliability, I hadn’t been convinced, but since then I have heard more. Now I know the stories are true, and so, I suppose, does everyone in three counties.

It was magnanimous of Ruth and George to even show up this weekend, but to treat us as well as they did, well, that’s going above and beyond. They didn’t say, “Your family hurt us, but we’re here anyway.” They didn’t bring the election up.

They had a sister named Debbie. Her life ended very poorly. When she was young, she was pretty and charming, and as far as I knew, everyone loved her. Later on, she married a selfish man, and he took her daughter away when they divorced. After that, her mental state declined, and she was diagnosed with schizophrenia. She was never able to get it together, and she eventually died from lung cancer.

I always felt bad for her, and although I didn’t say much at the time, I prayed for her. I thought she was a wonderful person, and life was very cruel to her.

I should have been more involved with my relatives when I was young. I was too introverted. Also, because I grew up with so much abuse, I had a natural tendency to feel that people weren’t interested in hearing from me. I didn’t think they hated me; just that I was not someone they thought about or missed. I had the feeling that if I had called them, they would have wondered why I was doing it.

Ruth invited me to the family reunion that’s coming on Labor Day, and I might actually go. My sister stole a bunch of family photos when my grandmother died, and I have been too lazy to sort and scan them and see if I should turn any of them over to other people. I thought that if I took them to a reunion, people might be able to figure out who was in the photos and where they were taken. I can do some of that myself, but some photos are mysteries to me.

Every time I get away from that town, I feel like my family and heritage are lost to me forever, so I quit thinking about them, but when I go back for funerals, it all comes back to life.

I gave Ruth my email address. She says she’s going to make me a copy of the family cookbook. I didn’t know it existed. I thought those recipes were gone forever.

Aunt Thelma claims she has my grandmother’s recipe for country ham. I sincerely hope she does, because no one could cure a ham like my grandmother and my great Uncle Charlie.

We all talked about Eastern Kentucky and its shortcomings. The simple truth is that it’s not a good place to live because too many of the people are backward. The area is crippled by intense racial prejudice, sexual sin, a deteriorating work ethic, and a perverse love of ignorance and drunkenness. I was surprised to hear Ruth agree with my assessment. She says she advises her grown children to make lives for themselves somewhere else.

I have an aunt who defends the area, but the obvious truth is that Eastern Kentucky is like a Christmas tree with very few lights working. When my mother was a kid, the region was so backward the rest of America sent missionaries there, and for decades, bright people have been moving elsewhere. The endless flight of the best minds has taken a heavy toll.

Regarding the brain drain, Harry Caudill, author of the book Night Comes to the Cumberlands, said everyone who had any get-up-and-go got up and went. I don’t know how original that thought was, but he was correct. My second cousin Byrd was a circuit judge, and he bemoaned his loneliness as an educated person. He said, “Just once, I’d like to use a three-syllable word.”

I heard an interesting story about bigotry while I was there. My grandfather died in the 1990’s, and a black woman showed up at his funeral. In the town where he died, this was a startling event. She was an attorney. She worked in Breathitt County, which was part of his circuit. Breathitt is a very dark place.

She said my grandfather had helped her with her career when she showed up in town. This is why she came to pay her respects. It must have been very scary for her to live in that area by herself, so I suppose she was touched when anyone reached out to her.

Some time after that, someone burned her house down. I assume she got the message and moved on.

I don’t think my grandfather was terribly advanced when it came to race relations, but he wasn’t an idiot.

There are smart people in Eastern Kentucky, and there are good Christians there. The problem is that they are few and their influence is small.

After the burial, I drove around with Thelma and Louise. We went by a 120-acre farm my family sold after my grandparents died. But for the dark cloud over the area, I wish I could buy it back and live there. It’s remote, and the back portion of it drops off in sheer cliffs overlooking the Red River Gorge. I can afford to buy it, but it won’t work. Not unless I can get used to hearing the N-word and dealing with people who don’t want to grow up. I have so many black friends, and I have two black godchildren…how would people treat me after they started visiting?

Here is the gate to the farm.

Here is a view of the farm in the distance. The grey barn is on the property. The barn to the left is not. My grandfather dropped a cow on me in that grey barn. Long story.

Right now, I live in the South. My nearest neighbors are from Alabama. Backward, right? No. The husband is a math major. The wife is in some medical field or other. Wonderful Christians. Kind people. You don’t have to be a fool to be from the South, and being from the South is no excuse.

On the way back, I took a couple of detours into Tennessee. I found myself driving through the Smokies. It was wonderful. It was so much like the Gorge. Mountain laurel everywhere. A babbling creek with pools and rapids. Trees I could actually identify. Here, as wonderful as the area is, everything is either a trash oak or a palm tree.

Most of the time, I was in a national park, but I wonder if there are similar areas where I can buy land. I wonder what the people are like. I’m told they’re not too trashy. Tennessee has its bad areas, but I don’t think it has ever been as disappointing as Eastern Kentucky. As you drive from Eastern Tennessee into Kentucky, everything starts to look less shabby and unkempt. It’s as if an invisible hand had shown up and shoved the buildings to make them stand straighter.

I’m too tired to write any more. I drove 500 miles today, which is 5/6 of my personal limit. I’ll get back to this tomorrow, in all likelihood. There isn’t that much more to tell.

I never got to see Rock City, if that’s what you’re hoping. I still have time, though.

Time to go Get the Ashes

I intended to post this yesterday.

My guests are gone.

I invited people to come on Saturday and remember my dad. Most people could not make it. The ones that made it didn’t fare well. One friend, and one of her sons, got sick. Another friend had a one-person wreck in her own yard, totaling her husband’s pickup truck and requiring x-rays. My neighbors had the strangest story of all. They went to Valdosta to see their granddaughter play in a college soccer game. When they arrived, she told them the game was on Sunday. When they tried to come home, the road was jammed, and it delayed them for an hour. To make matters worse, the wife stepped in a hole and sprained her ankle.

Sometimes it’s obvious when Satan wants to prevent something from occurring. When things started happening, I began praying for the safety of my guests.

In the end, the sick lady, her sons, the lady who wrecked the truck, her husband, and my two closest neighbors made it. This was the best we could do.

The neighbors brought food, and I made brownies and cookies. I used to take brownies and cookies to the ALF where my dad lived, so I thought I should make them for the event.

I spent about half an hour relating my dad’s amazing testimony, and people were very impressed by what God had done. It was very hard to speak at times, but I managed to push it out.

The lady who wrecked the truck is named Leah. Her husband is Scott. I’ve known them for quite a while. They drove from the Pensacola area. Leah got to know me back when I was on Facebook. She was interested in prayer in tongues. She got the baptism, and she even drove to Miami more than once to visit my church.

Scott and Leah stayed two days, and that was helpful. Had everyone simply left, there would have been a very abrupt transition, and the house would have felt very empty.

I am still working on getting my dad buried. My expectation is that I will have another grueling week, and then things will taper off. I have to travel to Kentucky, and then I have to drive back. Then I have to get to work on the estate.

Ordinarily, I don’t write about traveling until I’m finished. It’s like inviting people to rob your house. This time I’m making an exception, because before I go, I will be taking measures to protect my property.

I decided to drive. I can drive to Gainesville and then fly to Kentucky, but it’s expensive, and the drive to the airport is long. Taking a firearm will be a hassle, and the airline may make me jump through hoops in order to take my dad’s ashes. Also, I would like to see the South one more time, and I can’t do that through a plane window.

If I drive, I’ll be able to carry in every state I visit. I can also pick up whatever small items remain from my mother’s estate. My aunt is holding some things.

I carry my dad’s 9mm Glock now. Have I written about that? Years ago, I bought him a Glock for his birthday or Fathers’ Day or something. Later, I put a Crimson Trace laser on it. He hardly ever carried it. The pocket holster I got for him looks nearly new. I have been getting tired of my heavy 10mm, and I was considering carrying my own 9mm. One day after my dad died, I thought about his gun, and it seemed natural to start carrying it.

The gun was already my property. He gave me everything he owned, without exception, before he died. You don’t need a will to give someone a watch, a gun, or any other item of household personalty.

The 10mm is a far superior weapon. It fires a 180-grain Speer Gold Dot hollowpoint at 1250 FPS. I’ve been thinking about it, though. Being shot with a 9mm may not be quite the same, but it’s very bad indeed, and the reduced weight will be an improvement.

I like the laser. I used to think it was hinky because it couldn’t possibly line up with the barrel as well as a guide-rod Lasermax, but that was totally untrue. Also, a Crimson Trace turns on automatically when you grab the gun.

While my friends were here, we talked a great deal. We exchanged bits of Christian info. We prayed together, and that was pleasant, not to mention important.

There isn’t a whole lot left to do with regard to transferring stuff from my dad to me. The banks and so on only require a couple of simple forms, plus death certificates. I have to get myself appointed as the estate’s personal representative, and then I should have the authority to put his car in my name. I guess after that, I pay off his credit cards and close the estate.

I can only do so much per day, so I am not really on top of the court process yet, but I do know where to find the rules.

I now live in “my dad’s bedroom.” That’s what I’m trying not to call it. Everything here is mine now. I keep trying not to say “my dad’s” and “we.”

Having weekend guests gave me a good reason to start sleeping in the master suite. It’s not bad at all. I’m learning about the problems with the bedroom. I had to get on a ladder late at night to fix a blinking LED on a smoke alarm, and the next night, I learned that the dishwasher beeps for about half an hour when it stops running, so I had to make an adjustment for that. My dad had the ability to sleep through things like major hurricanes, so he never complained when he lived in that room.

Pretty soon I’ll be sleeping near Chattanooga, and not long after that, Winchester, Kentucky, home of Ale-9-One, the world’s finest soft drink. Then I’ll get my dad buried and head home. I may drive through the Smokies for no reason at all. I loved Gatlinburg and Cherokee when I was a kid. It will add two hours to the trip, but when will I see Appalachia again? It should be worth it.

The town where my dad will be buried (where my mother grew up) has a hotel now. As I could have predicted, their Hotels.com reviews say they have bedbugs and a bad attitude. Eastern Kentucky isn’t poor because we don’t send them enough money. It’s poor because the people make it poor. They have what I would call a “can’t-do attitude” about everything, and Lyndon Johnson wiped out their work ethic with the War on Poverty. A local humorist named Clennie Hollon called it “the War on Progress,” and he was right.

The hotel where I’m staying is part of a national chain, and it gets good reviews, so I should survive.

The Devil Doesn’t Want You to Visit Me

It’s surprising how much work is involved in leaving this earth. I always look forward to leaving my obligations behind, but it’s a mess for the survivors.

God has blessed me by streamlining things extremely well, so taking care of my dad’s final arrangements isn’t as bad as it could be.

I donated all of his clothes to the Salvation Army. I got him cremated. I deposited his will and a death certificate with the court. I arranged for him to be buried. I deleted his Facebook account.

I looked up the rules of probate court, so now I have some idea how I should handle things.

I wanted to have a gathering tomorrow for friends here at the house. Things are not going well for the people I intended to invite. My friend Mike had a toe amputated over the weekend, two days before my dad died, and now he’s penned up in live-in rehab for 11 days. My friend Amanda got the flu or something like it, and two days ago, her temperature was 102.4.

My friends Leah and Scott decided to come and stay Saturday night. She just texted. She has been in a wreck, and she is getting an x-ray.

Something doesn’t want people to hear my dad’s testimony. I would appreciate it if people who read this would pray for the opposing spirit to be defeated.

It doesn’t matter, because Satan can’t come up with a roadblock God didn’t know about in advance. However things shake out, Satan will be disappointed.

It appears that my dad’s car is the only thing that will have to go through probate. Today I read the applicable laws, and it turns out the law exempts two vehicles per decedent. I’m not sure what “exempts” means. I assume I’ll still have to tell the judge the car exists, but there must be some benefit. Maybe the court will give me a letter authorizing me to have the title changed.

Anyway, I intend to keep driving it. It appears that the intent of the law is to avoid confiscating cars from people and forcing them to buy new ones during probate.

One surprising thing is that I feel love flowing through me more freely than I did before my dad changed. I have been praying for this for years. He used to be a bit like a porcupine. When people tried to love him, he provoked and upset them, so it was a challenge. That changed when he changed.

Since he moved out in January, I have developed the habit of talking to the birds just to have noise in the house. I talk about how much I love my dad and what a wonderful father he was. The more I do it, the more the love flows. I’m so glad he didn’t die while there was tension between us. I’m hoping the flow of love will continue. Christians need to love God and other people. It’s not a pleasant luxury. It’s a need.

Unequal yokings can make it hard for love to pass through. You have to be very careful who you get close to.

I feel a little better every day, and I slept all night last night. God is faithful to heal and help.

A Picture of Grace

I related my dad’s testimony elsewhere, including the life jacket story, which you can read about in an earlier post. I decided to include a photo of the jacket. It’s downstairs by the fireplace. I took the photo and posted it, and then I realized something about the picture was moving me. I didn’t know what it was. Then I saw it.

Take a look at the neck opening on the jacket. Do you see anything?

I didn’t pose the lion there. It was just standing there when I walked over to take the picture. It’s a bookend my mother bought my father. I put it there while I tried to decide what to do with it. It has been there for weeks or months.

Jesus is the Lion of Judah.

The picture is remarkable, and it just happened. It was not planned.

I had a revelation night before last. I thought about the old people I had met at ALF’s, and I thought about the unbearable burden of trying to reach out to them all. It occurred to me that if I tried to help too many people, they would pull me down with them, like drowning people pulling a lifeguard under.

Suddenly, I thought of Peter trying to walk on the water. He only succeeded when he looked at Jesus. He ended up sinking anyway, but when Jesus took his hand, he rose and walked on water again.

Water represents the carnal world. The fish in the Sea of Galilee represent people waiting to be saved.

In the story of Peter’s walk on water, Jesus did what I wished I could do for ALF residents. What he did for Peter was a picture of Jesus reaching down and pulling a person out of the world through salvation.

It makes me realize my dad got his life jacket, and I don’t mean the one in the picture. No wonder God used a life jacket in his miracles! It was the perfect choice.

All those years ago, he knew I would take this picture and show it to people. Think of it.

There’s more. The jacket is bowing. See for yourself.

It’s chilling to think about. God is not being subtle at all.

Probate About to Begin

Today I decided to see if the court clerk would allow me to deposit my dad’s will. I had it with me, and I figured I should give it a shot even though I did not have a death certificate. The clerk has a sign that says they don’t give legal advice. But of course, they did.

They advised me against giving them the will at this point, and they mentioned various concerns regarding the way his property had to be treated. I took their advice, but I was a little disappointed. I don’t like having a will anywhere except in the hands of the court clerk.

I don’t mind getting legal advice from clericals. Sometimes they know things lawyers do not, even though they’re not qualified to practice. There is no point in being stuck-up and pretending you know everything.

I had been very concerned about the will, fearing it would be lost or that some other problem would pop up. Then I thought about it. As far as I know, the only thing that will go through probate is my dad’s car. Everything else has legally passed to me already, even though it won’t be fully documented until the death certificates are sent out. It appears that the will is relatively insignificant.

His attorney is a lifesaver. She showed me how to remove all of his real estate from probate during our first consultation, which was free. I did the work myself after I left her office. I was afraid to wait for our next meeting. The work took about half an hour and cost nothing at all.

I can’t help feeling bad because she got to do so little work. If I were a layperson, she could have billed me for more time. Those are the breaks, though. She has done some research for us since I last saw her, so she will definitely be compensated.

Today her secretary was talking about setting me up with a probate paralegal, but I don’t think I need one. To transfer a used car? Surely I can handle that. I really am a lawyer.

I don’t have any idea what I’m supposed to do with the car during the probate process. I plan to keep driving it, probate or not, unless the highway patrol comes and tells me to knock it off. My mom died, and nobody came and put a boot on her car. Same for my grandparents. I assume no one cares.

I got so used to ferrying my dad around, I quit driving my own vehicle. I still have it, but I have gotten really comfortable with his SUV. My vehicle is an enormous diesel pickup. I don’t really want to use it every time I leave the house.

There is no other beneficiary, so it’s not like I’m embezzling the use of the car from anyone. Maybe I’m embezzling it from myself. I probably won’t press charges.

Maybe I could blackmail myself and get money for not turning me in.

I donated his shower chair and the remaining medical supplies from his closet to the ALF, and I took all–ALL–of his clothes to the Salvation Army. I want all of that stuff GONE GONE GONE. It was depressing to see his favorite houseshoes on a shelf and his suits on hangers. When I put the suits in bags for the Salvation Army, I could smell him on them. They smelled the way his closet did when I was a kid. I don’t need that. This process is hard enough as it is.

While I was at the thrift store, I looked to see if they had anything good. Thrift stores are great places to buy cast iron cookware. The store was small and had very little that would interest anyone. I went next door to the Humane Society thrift store, and it was much larger. It was packed with merchandise. That upset me. People care more about dumb animals than they do about human beings. They should be ashamed. It’s despicable.

If it turns out the work I did on my dad’s real estate is sound, probate should be a snap. I was hoping to confirm it with the attorney this week, but my dad died before I made it to her office. I think we’re in the clear, though. It wasn’t a difficult legal problem to understand or solve. I’ll find out when I talk to her.

Because estate stuff isn’t my field, I will not take a chance and say I’m sure everything is fine. Good lawyers don’t shoot from the hip. They do research, or they refuse to issue firm conclusions.

This may be much easier than I had thought.

That’s all that’s happening right now. I still have a lot of pain, but it’s not like it was before. I love my dad very intensely. I feel like I lost a child. The last two days were hard, but no matter how strong grief is, time wears it down.

I was much closer to my mother than my dad, and she adored me. Somehow, losing her hurt less. Maybe it’s because my dad was so dependent and because he became so effusive with his love.

Today was good. I think tomorrow will be better.

Pain is Tempered by Expectancy

I keep getting great comments on my experiences with my dad’s decline and death. I want to thank everyone again.

I’m not wasting a second, getting things in order. Today I went to visit the cremation people, and I made all the arrangements and paid them. The total was $945. That includes everything, plus 10 death certificates. They would have provided an urn free of charge had I not bought one already.

I’m also getting the house and grounds fixed up. I keep my house very clean for the most part, but disorder is a problem. The yard is a mess. I started mowing again this week, and today I sprayed glyphosate on the weeds.

I may have people come here to observe my dad’s passing, and I don’t want to embarrass myself too much. I know I live like an eccentric, and that will always be true, but I have to try to make things as normal as I can for guests.

I stopped by the ALF today and dropped off what remained of my dad’s special supplies. They told me some of the residents were poor, so this stuff could be helpful. I don’t want it near me. That part of our lives is over. I could take them his shower chair, but I don’t want to go to the ALF again.

I miss going to the ALF, but I have to move on and get a feel for my new life.

One of the ALF staffers asked if we were having a service. She said they would like to come. I was very touched. They only knew him for a few weeks.

My neighbors called and said they would watch the house and care for my birds if I had to go to Kentucky. That was wonderful. The people here are tremendous.

Social Security has been notified. The insurance companies have been told to stop billing. When the death certificates roll in, I can deal with banks and so on. We…I…still own my dad’s house in Miami, and as of today, it’s for sale. His death put an end to my huge capital gains problem.

The grief is maybe 70% as intense as it was yesterday. I don’t mind it. I’m glad he became the kind of person I can miss a lot.

Yesterday I did something a little strange. I didn’t feel good in the evening, emotionally. I also felt I needed food. I decided to have breakfast. Breakfast is the most cheerful meal of the day. We eat it while we still are still full of hope. It reminds us that life is full of new beginnings. I had a fried egg, toast, and decaf. It made me feel a lot better.

A close friend asked how I felt today. I said I felt a mixture of grief and eagerness. I don’t have to explain the grief. The eagerness comes from losing the burden of caring for him. Now that he’s gone, there are many things I can do that I couldn’t do before. I can get on top of my responsibilities. I can sell things I’ve been wanting to sell. I can travel when I need or want to.

I’m dying to get my tools moved here. As much as I hate Miami, I may drive down this week, check things out, and make some decisions.

It may sound crazy, but I’m considering building a workshop. I have a house and a shop for the tractors and some of my tools. I have been planning to put my machine tools in my garage. It would be ritzier and more ergonomically sound to put them in a separate building.

I’ll need to find out what it would cost. I think the best thing would be to contact the builder who built the house, since they did such a fine job.

I think about things like this, and then I think about how much I love and miss my dad. When you lose someone you love, emotions come and go in waves. I know I’ll feel better tomorrow than I do today, and by the time we bury my dad, I should feel very good about everything.

I heard from some of my relatives today, and we had a great conversation. I feel like some members of my mother’s family have drifted off, and others are still on board with me. I should make an effort to tighten things up with the ones who are still interested.

I also had a long call from a young friend who is in law school at FSU. I remember meeting her when she was 17, at Trinity Church in Miami. She found out I was a lawyer, and she started asking me if I could write recommendations to help her get into school. She was already sure she wanted to be a lawyer, but she doubted herself. She thought the work might be too hard. Now she’s doing great, and her second year is coming to a close. I give her the best advice I can. Anyway, if I hold an event here, she wants to come. I told her I’d pay her fare.

She’s funny. Calls me “Esteban.”

My friend Amanda said she was going to bring food tonight, but she has a fever, so that’s off. She and her kids are sick all the time. They used to come every weekend. I believe something is trying to keep them away, because I tell them about God. I would appreciate it if people would pray for them.

Sometimes I feel like my dad is still alive. For example, I come in the house, and I feel like I need to start preparing for my daily ALF visit. Sometimes I feel like I should check my calendar to see if he has any medical appointments. Then I come to my senses.

I don’t want his memory to fade. I don’t look forward to a time years in the future, when he seems to be part of a distant past, as my mother does. It will happen, if God allows me to live. I can’t prevent it.

I don’t want to think of him as a dead person.

Things will get better, and I suspect God has someone who will appear and fill the void. Maybe a wife. Maybe new friends who will be involved in some kind of ministry with me.

I’m extremely glad my dad didn’t die in Miami. I was afraid he would end up in a home run by calculating mercenaries, surrounded by old Cubans who didn’t speak English. The people who care for him were great, for the most part, and everyone I have dealt with here since he died has been warm and helpful.

The funeral home director from the cremation place told me he wasn’t sure all of my dad’s remains would fit in the Amazon urn I got him. I told him I wasn’t going to be difficult to deal with. I said we could take whatever wouldn’t fit in the box and scatter it here on the farm. He said that was exactly what he was going to suggest. Very thoughtful.

Dad used to sit in a chair on the front porch and read his newspapers and do his puzzles. I would scatter the ashes on the lawn around the porch.

If I hold an event here, that’s what we’ll do. It’s a little unorthodox, but I don’t care.

That’s how things stand. I am still here, so I have to go on. My dad is in heaven, without a care in the world, surrounded by love and complete protection. I have to stop feeling sorry for him and start living.

The Way we Die Needs to Change

I suppose it will seem strange that I’m blogging again on a day like this, but I have to report on what’s happening.

I have been very down since my dad died. It hasn’t been 8 hours yet. I have been thinking over and over about how much I love him and how I wish I had done a better job for him. I wish I could spend a few more minutes talking to him and hearing him talk to me.

People have been calling me all day. I have also heard from them on Facebook. I put an announcement on my dad’s page, and his relatives have responded. Oddly, my mother’s family has not. I don’t know what to make of that. I wonder if they have believed some crazy lie my sister told them about me.

I may not have his funeral in Kentucky. My friends are very supportive and enthusiastic, and almost all of them are in Florida. If my relatives don’t show any interest, I’ll have a gathering here at the house, and then I’ll have my dad buried in Kentucky. My family has had a lot of funerals, and we did them all pretty much the same way, so I had assumed I would follow the pattern, but there is no point in it if my relatives aren’t on board.

I have received emails. I have received blog comments. I am grateful for all of it, and I thank everyone who took the time to say something.

I heard from my friend Mike, the hospice executive, and my friend Freddly, a former CNA who is now a nurse in some kind of management position. They know a good deal about death. Mike is getting a faith-based hospice running, and Freddly has seen many people die. Mike has been keeping up with our story, and tonight I told Freddly about it.

Mike told me some shocking things. He said he was amazed by my dad’s story. He said it was inspiring. He said he had required employees to read my blog. Imagine how surprised I was.

He feels things have gone exceptionally well. He gives me more credit than I deserve; God has stepped in over and over. Nonetheless, Mike tells me people usually die without peace, and their families aren’t much help.

Freddly told me she had only seen two people die the way my dad did, in peace. Two. She has probably seen hundreds of deaths. She said relatives don’t come to people’s bedsides. Families tear at each other. Dying people are in fear while they die; they fight it.

It wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that half of the people who die in America have bad deaths, but it was surprising to hear Freddly say she had only known of two people who hadn’t. What has happened to this country? I realize she works in the Miami area, where witchcraft is mainstream and people are hard and shallow, but the statistics should be better.

I haven’t written about my dad’s passing, so I’ll do it now.

This morning, he turned down food and water, but he could speak. I thought I had a few days left to be with him. I started calling around, making preparations for his death. I thought I’d go see him in the early afternoon, and things would be fine. We’d spend some time together, and maybe in a few days or a week, he would leave me.

At around 12:30, if memory serves, someone from the hospice called. She told me that, based on her experience, things were not going well. She said I needed to get over there.

I grabbed my mom’s old Bible, and I went to the ALF. I still thought he would survive the day. When I arrived, he was breathing heavily, and he couldn’t speak. He was on oxygen. He had the death rattle. He looked terrible. I can’t explain it, but it was as though I could see his bones through the skin of his hands and arms.

I sat down with him, and I made sure his oxygen apparatus was situated in his nose correctly. He was touching it, and it seemed to be farther from his nostrils than it should have been, so I fixed that. I sat with him and prayed, and his color improved. He began to look like a human being again. That’s the best way to describe it.

I got my Bluetooth speaker out and played Christian music on it. I told my dad everything I thought he needed to hear. I told him he was the best father a man could ask for, and I meant it. Whatever he was in the past, he became an ideal father over the last few weeks. I told him he owed me nothing. I told him there were no problems between us. I told him I loved him, and that I would not leave him. I said, “If you want to go, you can go. If you want to stay, you can stay.” I said that if he left, he would be with Jesus, and if he stayed, he would be with me.

I told him he had nothing to worry about, and that God was ready to receive him. I reminded him that my mother was waiting. I said I would be with him soon. I can’t remember all the things I said, but I poured out all I had.

I meant everything I said.

I remembered that he liked Derek Prince, so I looked for a video on Youtube. I played the audio from a sermon about thanks and praise. After I chose it, I realized how appropriate it was. He was probably about to enter God’s throne room. I had help choosing that video.

He relaxed. His breath grew less labored. His coloring looked nearly normal.

I remembered something. When I had played Derek Prince for him on other days, he had relaxed and sunk into it to the point where I was afraid he was dying. I asked myself if I was hastening his death by playing the video. He might just let go and sail off with the angels. I felt it was right, however, so I let it play.

I kept my hand on his arm almost the whole time. I rubbed his shoulder. I made sure he had contact. I didn’t know what he could perceive, and I felt he would be aware of my touch even if he couldn’t turn to look at me.

I spoke God’s opposition to any spirits that might be making things difficult.

He stopped making the rattle, and his breath grew extremely calm. He drifted off just as he had during other videos I had played. I couldn’t tell whether he was improving or getting worse. He had color. His hands were warm. He wasn’t agitated any more.

A time came when he was barely moving. I wasn’t sure if he was asleep or dying. Lately, he has slept silently, with almost no movement. He used to snore, but he stopped.

Eventually, I realized I couldn’t see any motion at all. His eyes were open. His mouth was open. I nudged him to see if I could get a reaction. I shook his arm a little. Nothing.

I went to the lady who ran the ALF and asked her to send someone to check him, and she confirmed that he was gone.

He was able to hear me when I arrived. I believe he heard every helpful thing I said. I believe he left this world knowing there was nothing whatsoever between us any more, apart from love.

This is the story I told Mike and Freddly.

Mike is so upset by the way most people die, he wants me to talk to his chaplains. I’m not sure what to do. His hospice isn’t confined to one faith. The brutal truth is that I can only help Christians, and by that I mean Bible-believing Christians who accept the work of the Holy Spirit.

As wonderful as it was to see my dad go peacefully, and as much as I would like to see other people have that experience, a pleasant departure from this world is not a satisfactory goal for me. It’s a temporary blessing, and it’s a by-product. I was always working to get my dad into God’s arms for eternity. The help he got at the end was just the tip of an infinite iceberg. It was a foretaste.

I can’t help Muslims or Jews. I can’t help Mormons. That’s just how it is. I am not here to promote “faith,” as though every religion were equally good. There is only one way to God. People who reject Jesus go to hell. I can’t sit at someone’s bedside and try to make them feel better while the demons wait to take them.

I didn’t make my dad feel better. The Holy Spirit did. I can’t make him show up at the bedside of someone who rejects Jesus. To try would be whoredom on my part.

One of the worst problems Americans have is our pathological determination to force each other to approve of every religion. It’s good not to offend people, but Satan has taken us beyond that, to the point where we tell each other all religions lead to God. It’s not true. Jesus was not tolerant at all. He said, “No man comes to the Father but by me.”

My dad is in heaven right now, with my mother. That’s what matters. God helped with the transition because we were on the right track and we submitted, not because he wants to make life on earth perfect and stress-free for everyone.

Listening to Mike and Freddly made me feel great. It cut the legs out from under my grief. I feel much better than I did earlier. I had been wondering how I would endure the night, but now I can rest.

I feel great because now I see how blessed my dad and I are. Very few people get what we did.

I wonder if I can help anyone else. I almost feel like volunteering to adopt ALF residents and help them prepare. I don’t think that will happen, but I wish I could do something. This world is full of poor seniors everyone wants to forget, and they need help. ALF’s are warehouses we use to get people out of our sight and out of our way. They should be processing centers for Jesus, where the hopeless, lonely, and forgotten fall into God’s arms.

Tomorrow I’ll visit for the last time, as far as I know. I’m going to donate a bunch of things my dad doesn’t need any more. After that, there will be an abrupt end to my practice of going every day. I’ll miss it. It was a burden in some ways, and I need to be free to travel and do things, but I almost always felt great when I walked in and caught sight of my dad. I knew he would be elated as soon as he realized I was there, and we would get to talk and pray. I will also miss a few of the other residents.

I suppose most of the residents I met will be gone in a few months. The turnover is very fast.

Freddly has problem parents, so while I was talking to her, I told her some things I had learned. Maybe she’ll stick with it and get what I got. She says she plans to call and talk regularly.

I can sleep now, so I believe I’ll go do that. God has blessed my dad and me beyond anything I could have imagined. God is faithful, and he is ready to give us more good things than we can guess. Keep pursuing him, and you will find relief you never knew was possible.

World’s Best Dad, Eating the World’s Best Brownies